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WORK TITLE: Sympathy for Wild Girls
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://demreemcghee.com/
CITY: San Diego
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COUNTRY: United States
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PERSONAL EDUCATION:
University of California San Diego, B.A.; studied at San Diego State University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
Contributor of shirt fiction to journals and periodicals, including Lunch Ticket, Wax Nine Journal, and Burn All Books.
SIDELIGHTS
Demree McGhee is a writer who studied at the University of California San Diego and San Diego State University. She has published short fiction in a number of journals and periodicals, including Lunch Ticket, Wax Nine Journal, and Burn All Books. In an interview in Debutiful, McGhee talked about the timeframe of writing her debut collection, Sympathy for Wild Girls. She recalled: “I wrote the stories in Sympathy over the course of four or five years. I only started writing once I started undergraduate school, so I feel like everything I read during this time has been formative to who I am as a writer and a person.”
McGhee published her debut short story collection, Sympathy for Wild Girls, in 2025. While the mostly California-based characters differ from story to story, the female protagonists all feel uncomfortable in their circumstances and even in their own bodies. One must put rocks in their pockets to avoid floating away after a traumatic experience, while another struggles to lose weight since her student athlete days ended. Some stories center around prophetic characters, while others take petty thieves as their focus.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor claimed that “McGhee has a unique vision with the chops to bring it to life.” The same critic called Sympathy for Wild Girls “a daring debut collection of enigmatic short stories.” Booklist contributor Allison Escoto suggested that “older teens will enjoy the central characters at relatable stages in life and the elements of magical realism.” In a review in ForeWord, Isabella Zhou stated: “Sometimes gruesome and morbid, the short stories in Sympathy for Wild Girls dissect the discomforts and dissatisfactions of queer Black women.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2025, Allison Escoto, review of Sympathy for Wild Girls, p. 37.
ForeWord, April 21, 2025, Isabella Zhou, review of Sympathy for Wild Girls.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2025, review of Sympathy for Wild Girls.
ONLINE
Debutiful, https://debutiful.net/ (June 9, 2025), author interview.
Demree McGhee website, https://demreemcghee.com (October 18, 2025).
Demree McGhee is a writer. She earned her BA from the University of California San Diego and she is currently a MFA student and teaching associate at San Diego State University. Her work has been published in Lunch Ticket, Wax Nine Journal, Burn All Books, and more. Her debut short story collection, Sympathy for Wild Girls, is available from Feminist Press. She likes writing about feral girls and women.
My Reading Life: Sympathy for Wild Girls author Demree McGhee wants Bless Me, Ultima to be the classic high school assignment
June 9, 2025by Adam
Demree McGhee is currently pursuing her MFA at San Diego State University, and her debut story collection, Sympathy for Wild Girls, is already on bookstore shelves. The collection is a knockout selection of stories that move between reality and the surreal. McGhee takes readers to places rarely visited on the page, and the stories dance between fever dreams and stark truths.
We asked McGhee to answer our recurring My Reading Life questionnaire so readers could get to know her and the books that shaped her life.
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What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
I really latched onto James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl around the third grade. I had a teacher, who I loved, who narrated it out loud to us as we read along at our desks. She really put her whole body into it, and it was a very impressive performance to me as a child. There’s a somber comfort in that book. James is terrified of this force that sounds mystical and amorphous but also has the real capacity to harm him. I think it was the first book I remember reading that used surreal elements to more accurately describe the intensity of the internal, which was important to me as someone who had a lot of feelings but not the capacity to express them. I also enjoyed the family he forms with those bugs, who are all queer, obviously. I own the same edition that I read in elementary school, the one with the cover illustrated by Lane Smith.
What book helped you through puberty?
Somehow I came across the book The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery in middle school. I think it was the first “adult” book that I ever read. I had to stop every five minutes to look up words I didn’t know, and that process made me feel very intelligent. I think I learn better when I have more time, so it was also one of the first instances where I felt like I was taking control of my education outside of school. One of the main characters is an insightful depressed tween, so I suppose it was the first book that made me feel seen during a time where I was very isolated. I would explain the premise of the book to adults and they would tell me I shouldn’t read it, which only encouraged me to keep reading. I think this was also my first memory of crying at a book, something I do frequently now. I feel like it furthered my capacity to feel empathy which is important for a child.
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What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
I think every teenager should read Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya. I think it could (and should) replace Catcher in the Rye as “the coming-of-age book you have to read in high school.” I’ve taught the book to college freshmen before and they seemed to really enjoy it. I think part of growing up is learning to differentiate your own desires from the desires of the people who raised you. Bless Me Ultima captures the anxiety young people feel when they have to decide what they want their life to look like. Sometimes, especially from an Americentric perspective, growing up seems to mean isolating yourself from whatever encompassed your upbringing, which I’m not sure is entirely possible. I feel like Anaya’s answer as to what to do with your upbringing is that it has no choice but to be a part of your adult life. And this isn’t a bad thing. Your independent self is not detached from your upbringing, it’s informed by it, and you have the choice to be an even more insightful person because of it. The book is also a good gateway to talk about larger prevalent social issues, like colonialism and sexism.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
In a perfect world where I’d have the time to teach multiple full length books in a class (and I wasn’t worried about any cohesive themes or objectives) I’d teach Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, Fledgling by Octavia Butler, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, and There There by Tommy Orange, to name a few. These are all books where I felt fascinated by the writing alone. A very kind friend once told me that he enjoyed my work so much that he’d read a grocery list if I wrote it. That’s the way I feel about these books.
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What books helped guide you while writing your book?
I wrote the stories in Sympathy over the course of four or five years. I only started writing once I started undergraduate school, so I feel like everything I read during this time has been formative to who I am as a writer and a person—Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh, Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang, Piercing by Ryu Murakami, Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi, My Body by Emily Ratajkowski, Nevada by Imogen Binnie, Black Friend by Ziwe, Diary of a Void by by Emi Yagi, Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, Passing by Nella Larsen, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom, and Things that I do in the dark by June Jordan—to name a few.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Right now I’m reading Honey Mine by Camille Roey and Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun by Jackie Wang. However, I’m also the type of person to stop reading in the middle of a book for months because I get distracted by something else, so the books I’m “currently” reading are always in rotation. I just devoured Siren Queen by Nghi Vo which felt like everything I need in a book. It’s the first book I’ve read by Vo, and I found her use of magical realism to be very engaging. Magic saturates the book, the whole thing seems to shimmer.
Demree McGhee; SYMPATHY FOR WILD GIRLS; The Feminist Press (Fiction: Short Stories) 17.95 ISBN: 9781558613386
Byline: Isabella Zhou
Demree McGhee's Sympathy for Wild Girls is an atmospheric short story collection about the restlessness of Black girls and women.
Attentive to queer Black femininity, this collection centers those who are discontent with love, friends, family, and themselves. In the opening story, Daisy, frightened by her mother's cautionary stories of victimized Black girls, runs away to join the coyotes. In "She Is Waiting," Ava's girlhood kidnapping causes her to float, having a dire effect on her college friendships and romance.
The book is filled with restless dread, as when Black women and girls are haunted by graphic images of squirming carrion and monstrous creatures. The gradual unveiling of an isolated girl's fixation on reviving dead animals instills creeping body horror in "Scratching," narrated by a grieving school nurse. "Thinning" is an intimate examination of a woman's growing obsession with her weight amid gym and diet culture, escalating toward dizzying internal descriptions of an eating disorder.
The depictions of Black women and their romantic and platonic relationships with other women are uneasy, even cruel, resisting easy catharsis. The mother in "A Matter of Survival" admits to her rebellious daughter "I could beat you Breath iron sharp. I won't because I love you, but I could." Later, she sends the girl to her grandmother after discovering her intimacy with another girl. Tempestuous relationships are perhaps most fleshed out in "Be Good," in which a woman who's resentful of her mother escapes cross-country and forms a blunt partnership with a conservative Christian influencer who treats the woman's Black hair's dandruff in exchange for her silence about the influencer's sex life, given her public espousal of chastity.
Sometimes gruesome and morbid, the short stories in Sympathy for Wild Girls dissect the discomforts and dissatisfactions of queer Black women.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Foreword Magazine, Inc.
http://www.forewordmagazine.com
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Source Citation
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Zhou, Isabella. "Sympathy for Wild Girls; Stories." ForeWord, 21 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837432280/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=134359bc. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Sympathy for Wild Girls. By Demree McGhee. May 2025. 212p. Feminist, paper, $17.95 (9781558613386).
Blackness, queer identity, race and class divides, body image, friendship, feminism, and all the attendant facets of coming-of-age are explored in McGhee's unique and compelling short-story collection. The tightly written stories and the charismatic girls and women who populate them are captivating and layered. The title story finds a young girl running away from becoming one of the many "dead girls" her mother warns her about, feeling trapped inside her own body as well as inside a reality in which danger lurks around every corner. "At night Daisy stares at the ceiling and shudders at the feeling of the sheets against her chest. Even through her pajamas, the feeling of her skin touching itself--her tongue dry in her mouth, her arm across her belly, her thighs pressing together--makes her stomach roil." The real fear portrayed in the story culminates in a supernatural encounter in a forest among coyotes. McGhee writes in between the real and surreal, mixing dreamlike elements with stark realism, striking a balance that infuses each story with inventive and effective storytelling. A promising debut.--Allison Escoto
YA: Older teens will enjoy the central characters at relatable stages in life and the elements of magical realism. AE.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Escoto, Allison. "Sympathy for Wild Girls." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 15-16, Apr. 2025, p. 37. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847030132/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=38023ef4. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
McGhee, Demree SYMPATHY FOR WILD GIRLS Feminist Press (Fiction None) $17.95 5, 6 ISBN: 9781558613386
Queer Black women strike out into the world on their own terms.
While their histories and points of view differ, McGhee's women are linked by how uncomfortable they feel in their bodies, how uncomfortably they move in the space in which they're expected to exist. One woman must load her pockets with rocks to keep from floating away after a traumatic life event, while another works to shed the weight she's gained since her days as a student athlete. The protagonists struggle with intimate connections, grief, self-acceptance, hope, faith, restlessness, transformation, and desire. A school nurse develops an inappropriate relationship with a student--no, not like that. The "how" is as alarming as it is profound. Other stories feature prophets and petty thieves. Some are tethered to our modern world of big-box stores and social media influencers, while others feel out of time, fablelike. Most take place in California. Readers looking for traditional short stories might find themselves vexed. The pieces aren't incomplete, but rather fragmented. Sure, a vase can be beautiful, but the broken shards of glass that remain intact after it falls from a table or is hurled against a wall can be even more enticing to look at and touch. There is ample craft here, cunning description as well as an urgent, evocative voice that demands attention. McGhee harnesses the magic of language and narrative and character into a new kind of vessel to hold what it feels like to be young and Black and queer. Not every story succeeds, but each one takes unexpected risks. McGhee has a unique vision with the chops to bring it to life. Every woman she's created here is in danger and dangerously powerful in her own way, if she can figure out how.
A daring debut collection of enigmatic short stories.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"McGhee, Demree: SYMPATHY FOR WILD GIRLS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832991674/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8645857c. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.